Asian Paints

Leveraged digital innovations to become customer centric

Asian Paints is a company that reinvents itself every generation. To those growing up in the
70s-80s, Asian Paints was India’s largest paint manufacturer. A generation later, in the early
2000s, the company expanded its product portfolio from paints to decorative coating.
The company found its next big act in the B2C painting services with its Ezycolour Consultancy
for offering color, décor, and Vastu inspired solutions to customers. This marked Asian Paints
transition from being a product company to a services company providing a wide range of
home improvement solutions. It is worth noting that at the heart of every reinvention exercise
is the urge to get closer to the end-customer and rediscover core customer choices.

In 2013, a company specializing in modular kitchen space showed up on its radar. This was the
kind of company Asian Paints would do well to acquire. Acting upon the perceived
opportunity, it snapped up Sleek Group to diversify into modular kitchens segments, as a
logical step up the value chain. Close on the heels of this acquisition, Asian Paints scooped up
the front-end business of Ess Ess Bathroom to foray into the bathroom segment.

Changing tack

At Asian Paints, business and IT have always been close like two coats of paint.
The strength of the existing platforms that enable Asian Paints to chase growth, as well as
appreciate the need for it, is drawn from the company’s past, particularly the last decade. As
a company with a passion to push the future, Asian Paints stepped up its efforts on the
digital front when the word had not even entered the corporate lexicon. Take for instance,
Asian Paints’ adoption of automated storage and retrieval systems in 2008. This was the
time when robotic warehousing was unheard of in the Indian manufacturing industry. The
company had no reference points. Stirred by the courage of its conviction, Asian Paints
adopted robotic warehousing and integrated it with ERP to solve the problems of a bloated
inventory, supply chain efficiency and factory level losses, in one stroke.

At home with Digital

IT effectiveness is reflected in the strength of fundamental business operations. The
decorative major has upgraded its demand forecasting platform which allowed better
predictability of the sales patterns across various geographies and brands. This will help in
improving the ability to service an ever increasing range of products while keeping inventory
levels within control.

Investments in the data mining platform are being leveraged to gain insights into a wide
variety of business problems in logistics, people analytics, and material sourcing. “We are
continuously striving to explore key emerging technologies that are relevant for the
business. As an organization we have matured on the analytics journey and are now on the
path towards predictive and prescriptive analytics”.
The company is moving up hand over hand like a champion in the digital era. Asian Paints
has harnessed the cloud model to facilitate its business operations. Its journey on to the
cloud has been gradual wherein it started with the website going on cloud followed by
enterprise mail. As the comfort levels increased, the company shifted quite a few critical
enterprise processes like the entire employee lifecycle processes, frontline sales
engagement processes and customer visualization processes to the cloud.

The IT team have successfully conducted PoCs in emerging technologies like IoT, Artificial
Intelligence, Conversational chat bots, Natural language translation and 3-D visualization of
home décor.The company has used the combination of industrialized sensors, automation,
and social media analytics to catalyse both internal operations and customer-driven product
development and marketing outreach.

“Social Media has been an area wherein we did make early investments. We first used it to
address customer complaints. Any customer complaining about our products was reached
out to and engaged till mutually acceptable solutions were reached. We have run quite a few
successful campaigns on the social media to inspire, educate and help our customers make
better choices on colours,” he reveals.

Be home and dry

Asian Paints is creating a compelling digital vision and driving appropriate synergies to build
technology platforms that foster customer focused innovation. “Digital will transform us
from being a brick-and-mortar business into a click-and-mortar business. We are marrying
digital technology with the physical network we have built over the past 75 years, to service
our customer. Winning in a digital world is all about how you weave and create an
ecosystem that is digitally connected.

The company has a strong web presence and this serves as a strong platform for consumers
looking for painting and decorating their homes. All key websites of Asian Paints,
www.asianpaints.com, www.sleekworld.com, www.beautifulhomes.com and the websites
of international units have been significantly revamped. “We believe that in every
interaction with the customer, she tries to tell us a little about herself. By leveraging
advanced web analytics and personalisation technology, these websites understand the
online behaviour to position the right content and offers to the consumer in line with their
preferences,” he says.

In the home décor space, having the right visual look goes a long way in helping the
customer make the right choice. In order to address this customer need, Asian Paints has
invested in 3-D visualization technology for the ‘Asian Paints Homes Stores’ and for the
kitchen business. This empowers the Asian Paints consultants to create an intuitive visual
model within a short period of time thereby not only reducing the consulting time but also
nudges the consumer to complete the buying journey,”.
Asian Paints has implemented an ideation software “Eureka” for capturing ideas around new
products. This software has helped in generating a significant number of ideas and has seen
an encouraging response across.Persona-based IT systems that are tailor-made to cater to
employees in sales function have been implemented. This has significantly enhanced not
only the productivity but also decision making and speed of execution. We have created a
Virtual TSO (Territory Sales Officer) App for the smaller dealers to increase the connect with
them and provide focused service to this segment.

Driving home the importance of customer focus

Any business without customers is like a stage without light. And the company incorporates
it as a guiding principle of his digital strategy. He has always put customers at the top of his
pyramid of priorities, a mandate passed on to him during his stint in across business
functions.
Decor and paint are categories that people want to share with their friends and family and
get their inputs on it. “Visualizing a home is an immersive experience. Our Signature stores
inspire people to fully stamp their personality on their living space. Similarly, the evolution of
our Ezycolour consultancy service, offered at consumers’ homes aims to inspire change. Our
efforts culminate at one point, the point where customers see their perfect home, and Asian
Paints is an integral part of it. The company have strived to offer relevant and contextual
interactions to our customers by identifying their needs at different stages in the décor
cycle,”.

Asian Paints is leveraging digital to engage customers, dealers, and influencers. “We are
looking at customer experience through a multichannel lens. We have set up an IT
architecture that supports personalized consumer journeys across physical (Colour Ideas,
Signature Stores), digital (Website, Mobile, Kiosks) and human (Colour consultancy, AID)
touch points through seamless integration of multiple systems,” he states.

It’s a matter of finding out what can ease the pain points of customers. The company has
created unique colour visualizer apps that allow customers to experience colour and décor.
These are also used to offer colour consultancy services which offer a unique value
proposition in the market.

As a part of his digital strategy, they are trying to stitch together the online and offline
experience and be by the customer’s side throughout the journey. “We believe that our
customer experiences would be the differentiator in a tough décor market.

“We have made significant progress around creating Next Generation Omni Channel
experience for our dealer community. This will allow a seamless experience for Asian Paints
dealers across voice, web and mobile channels. We have launched a comprehensive mobile
app for our dealers. The app has now become a very popular channel of interaction for the
dealers. Today a contractor can engage with our customers and us through an easy to use
the mobile app. “If you don’t take customers on a digital journey you are paving the way to a
parallel ecosystem which would be tough to manage and extremely expensive to sustain.
When it comes to digital, small beginnings lead to big transformations,”.

This urge to transform itself helps Asian Paints dismantle a whole set of assumptions about
legacy companies.